A Puritanical Constitutionalism – Sarah A. Morgan Smith

It is an unusual book about the Puritans that opens with a bar brawl. 

Adrian Chastain Weimer begins her book, A Constitutional Culture, by introducing us to one of its villains, royal commissioner Sir Robert Carr, who apparently relied upon the warmth of liquor to keep off the January chill. This particular evening “was the Sabbath, but he showed scant sign of knowing it.” Asked to move along home in accordance with local legislation by a constable, “Carr refused, at first with words and then with fists, ‘asayleing beating and wounding’ the enforcing officer.” Carr and his friends then departed the tavern, and perhaps the incident would have ended there—had he not bragged while still in his cups that he would gladly “do it again.” 

Unsurprisingly, the abused officer brought charges against Carr, who refused to appear in the Massachusetts court for trial, on the grounds that as a representative of the Crown, he need not submit to the local authorities. Carr’s furtive departure from the Bay colony brought an end to that particular conflict—but only underscored the much larger conflict between “royal prerogative and … local constitutional ideals.” It’s a rollicking good tale, actually, and Weimer’s style is a delight; she writes in the manner of the best narrative historians, capturing the tension of these high-stakes moments so vividly that one almost forgets that they have been over and done for nearly 400 years. Perhaps, in some measure, this sense of urgency is enhanced by the similar tests of civic principle in our own time. Where, one wonders, are the leaders who will defend America’s charters of government against the whims of arbitrary and powerful elites?

Puritan Constitutionalism

Weimer’s emphasis is on what she terms “constitutional culture,” a concept that encompasses not merely laws and institutional forms, but the entire ethos undergirding such things, including “folklore, stories, prayers, and other cultural expressions.” Unsurprisingly, in Puritan Massachusetts this culture was steeped in the language of the Bible as well as the natural law tradition. Weimer, unlike many historians, takes seriously the theological elements of such a culture, recognizing the Reformed understanding that God often works providentially through the ordinary means of human agency. 

In New England she argues that this culture was “marked by a wariness of metropolitan ambition, a defensiveness about civil and religious liberties, and a conviction that self-government was divinely sanctioned.” These attributes were embodied in various practical ways in the institutions and laws of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but their manifestation in those formal structures depended, Weimer argues, on the cultivation of habits of thinking cultivated in the informal conversation and reflection among citizens that happened in the course of ordinary life. Hearthside discussions, personal devotional ponderings, private letter writing, or public gatherings for study and prayer all played a role in shaping the Puritans into a people who valued limited government and the preservation of individual freedoms (particularly in the areas of conscience and speech). Tellingly, given their Calvinist convictions, they also trusted the rule of law as a check against the sort of political vices that tended to accompany arbitrary power. As Thomas Shepard said, “Where laws rule, men do not.”

Weimer’s focus is broader than Puritan ideas, so she does not neglect Puritan institutions and, in fact, devotes several of the book’s chapters to specific groups most essential for the development of Puritan constitutional culture: the courts, churches, and town meetings. Throughout, she thoughtfully elucidates the nuance of Puritan rhetoric, and provides careful exegesis of episodes that illustrate the ways in which habits of individual and congregational self-governance provided transferrable skills for the civic and political problems facing the colony. To cite just one example: her chapter on colony-wide fast days as a means towards “communal discernment” is both innovative and insightful, drawing attention to the fact that “for many seventeenth-century men and women, communal prayer informed political decision making and consensus building.” Weimer draws attention to elements of seventeenth-century Puritanism that are seldom even mentioned by scholars outside of the field of religious history, and in doing so, highlights the deeply political aspects of such traditions. This is a period that is relatively unfamiliar even to most scholars of early Anglo-America, and I applaud Weimer for drawing attention to it.

Anti-Monarchical Sympathies 

Yet, despite its overall excellence, the book is lacking in certain respects. 

Weimer is oddly unwilling to acknowledge the extent of Puritan sympathies with anti-monarchical elements in England, to the point where some quietly approved the regicide of Charles I. “Few supported the king’s execution or envisioned an end to the monarchy,” she claims, but then continues in the very next sentence, “They did, however, help create the conditions under which regicide first became thinkable, and then, somehow, doable.” Her entire portrayal of the regicide makes it seem almost like an accident that Charles I was put to death. Yet, as even she acknowledges, there were Puritans who felt that Charles’s death was not only justifiable but deserved, and that “Bay colony ministers had hinted at the legitimacy of regicide as early as 1635.” And—again, as Weimer herself acknowledges—anti-monarchical arguments not only appear in earlier Christian political theory, but they also play a prominent part in the distinctively Reformed political theology of the Puritan community on both sides of the Atlantic.

Following Calvin, not to mention earlier medieval thinkers such as Augustine and John of Salisbury, New England thinkers developed a robust theory in which the purpose of government was the protection of individual rights necessary for the end of human flourishing. Governments destructive of these ends were illegitimate and could be lawfully resisted for failing to fulfill their proper purpose. They ceased to be governments in any meaningful sense of the word. (In the same way as for Augustine, “an unjust law is no law at all.”) This was compounded by the rediscovery of Hebraic republicanism in the sixteenth century, which eventually led some thinkers to elevate the commonwealth as the biblical ideal of governmental form, and the most radical among them to reject monarchies (even “good” ones) as nothing short of idolatry. With varying degrees of explicitness, a significant strain of Christian political theology from Augustine onward leaned in an anti-monarchical direction. In these thinkers, there are more than occasional hints that arbitrary rulers might legitimately be resisted, deposed, and even executed.

Yet Weimer suggests that New Englanders—happy heirs to much of this commonwealth biblicism—were lukewarm participants in England’s civil wars at best and that “with few exceptions … the colonists did not justify the regicide or reject Charles II’s legitimacy.” It is worth noting that the reverse is also true: there are a handful of examples of folks tut-tutting the regicide as a marker of just how badly things had gotten out of hand in dear old England, but few New Englanders actually condemned the regicide or suggested that Cromwell’s commonwealth government was illegitimate.

The Puritans offer an example of how essential it is to cultivate the virtues and habits of citizen-watchmen who can preserve a culture of robust self-government.

In other words, this is largely an argument from silence. Few of the surviving records directly and clearly address the issue either way. Weimer chooses to interpret this as evidence that New Englanders were moving in “stumbling increments” towards “a constitutional arrangement that allowed for ‘tender consciences,’ one that prioritized the welfare of the godly before the interest of the king.” One might just as easily interpret it as evidence that the colonists were already comfortable with a political theology that prioritized liberty of conscience, the principles of self-government, and the legitimacy of violent resistance in the face of despotism.

As to accepting Charles’ legitimacy, the question is largely moot. It is impossible to imagine the colonists mounting a successful insurrection of their own against the Restored Stuarts, nor (as Weimer fully demonstrates) did they need to, as their sheer distance from London allowed them a broad measure of practical self-government approaching full sovereignty.

It is unclear why Weimer hedges her bets on this point. Perhaps she fears other historians will accuse her of anachronistically reading her subjects if she portrays them as too anti-monarchical in their thinking? Or perhaps she fears the potential repercussions of forceful political resistance in the present and wishes to make this sort of political drama appear more or less unintentional, a happenstance of the times? This, however, is not true: to say that the “constitutional culture” Weimer highlights developed incrementally is not to say that it developed accidentally.

Whatever her reasons, Weimer’s reticence about Puritan support for the regicide and the revolution more broadly is odd, given that Puritan resistance theorizing (even to the point of supporting the regicide) is, to a large extent, the pivot upon which the entire project turns. All of the habits of active citizenship Weimer points to as key elements of the Puritan struggle are grounded in their conviction that the individual conscience, rightly instructed, can discern and follow the will of God regarding both secular and sacred matters. Consensus among individual believers (expressed primarily in the habits of civil discussion and practices of communal discernment that Weimer illuminates so well) was a check against the excesses of protestant resistance but was by no means a repudiation of its logical end in the overthrow of kings and potentates who usurped the powers of God.

I am not a fan of post hoc ergo propter hoc arguments, yet it is unavoidably apparent to anyone who reads between the lines that the very existence of the godly commonwealth of Massachusetts Bay depended upon a certain willingness to engage in resistance to the monarchy. While Weimer’s focus is on the years following the Stuart Restoration in 1660, leading Puritan thinkers in New England from the time of the colony’s establishment were writing and preaching about the merits of the type of conversational constitutional culture she describes from the colony’s founding. English Puritanism developed out of the practice of lay-led discussion groups which met in parallel with the Church of England’s parish services, often engaging in not only the study of Scripture but critique of the established church’s theology and its hierarchical structure. When they were able to organize congregational and colonial governments according to their own lights in New England, they created institutions that prioritized the input of ordinary citizens/congregants and encouraged participatory dialogue as a means of ensuring the basis of these systems lay in active and ongoing consent.

In addition, the Puritans were, by nature of their religious beliefs, inclined towards a rather more limited view of the appropriate powers of all types of government than many of their contemporaries. The colony’s earliest legal codes clearly list the many rights (liberties) retained by the people, including those of freedom of speech, petition, and assembly.

Convinced their beliefs were both right and righteous, John Winthrop, Thomas Shepard, John Cotton, Henry Dunster (one-time president of Harvard), John Eliot (leading missionary to the native population), John Davenport, and a host of others repeatedly reminded New Englanders that the freedoms they enjoyed in both church and civil government were evidence of divine favor and not to be taken lightly. The tradition of Reformed resistance theory was one in which the ordinary people of the colony were well-steeped. Indeed, in one of my favorite moments in the book, Weimer recounts that an elderly New England woman declared that the king “was a traitor, and if … she was a man and was in England, she would be his death or he should be hir [sic] death.” The constitutional culture in New England, in other words, was inherently revolutionary within the context of the English polity, and thus, the Puritans’ resistance to the monarchy and eventual support for the regicide was neither accidental nor surprising.

The Limits of Government

In America, much ink has been spilt over the need to abandon or at least de-escalate the culture wars. Yet, if the Puritans of Weimer’s study are to be taken as a lesson for anything, it is of the vital importance of vigilance against those who seek to undermine the philosophical foundations of republicanism. New Englanders succeeded in no small part because they were able to maintain a robust sense of the limits of government, and a commitment to protecting the liberties of individual citizens. As Weimer so admirably demonstrates, the Puritans developed “a cogent, fully articulated constitutional culture, including language for criticizing arbitrary rule and evaluating the consequences of each expansion of royal prerogative.” Such tools are only useful when they are appropriately wielded, however, and this requires a willingness to speak against all those who threaten the natural rights and civic identity of the people, whether they be in the halls of power, the local classroom, or at the neighborhood block party. 

Americans are unlikely to be called to a renewed struggle against monarchial authority, but we remain under the threat of an unaccountable executive branch, while also being saddled with a national legislature that has largely abdicated the task of making general laws and doing the people’s work. The Puritans offer an example of how essential it is to cultivate the virtues and habits of citizen-watchmen who can preserve a culture of robust self-government. And following their example in that respect may be the most vital task before us.